When the right to bear arms includes the mentally ill

Sunday

Dec 22, 2013 at 6:00 AM

By Michael Luo and Mike McIntire THE NEW YORK TIMES

Last April, workers at Middlesex Hospital in Connecticut called police to report that a psychiatric patient named Mark Russo had threatened to shoot his mother if officers tried to take the 18 rifles and shotguns he kept at her house. Russo, who was off his medication for paranoid schizophrenia, also talked about the recent elementary school massacre in Newtown and told a nurse that he "could take a chair and kill you or bash your head in between the eyes," court records show.

Police seized the firearms, as well as seven high-capacity magazines, but Russo, 55, was eventually allowed to return to the trailer in Middletown where he lives alone. In an interview there recently, he denied that he had schizophrenia but said he was taking his medication now — though only "the smallest dose," because he is forced to. His hospitalization, he explained, stemmed from a misunderstanding: Seeking a message from God on whether to dissociate himself from his family, he had stabbed a basketball and waited for it to reinflate itself. When it did, he told relatives they would not be seeing him again, prompting them to call the police.

As for his guns, Russo is scheduled to get them back in the spring, as mandated by Connecticut law.

"I don't think they ever should have been taken out of my house," he said. "I plan to get all my guns and ammo and knives back in April."

The Russo case highlights a central, unresolved issue in the debate over balancing public safety and the Second Amendment right to bear arms: just how powerless law enforcement can be when it comes to keeping firearms out of the hands of people who are mentally ill.

Connecticut's law giving the police broad leeway to seize and hold guns for up to a year is actually relatively strict. Most states simply adhere to the federal standard, banning gun possession only after someone is involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility or designated as mentally ill or incompetent after a court proceeding or other formal legal process. Relatively few with mental health issues, even serious ones, reach this point.

As a result, the police often find themselves grappling with legal ambiguities when they encounter mentally unstable people with guns, unsure how far they can go in searching for and seizing firearms and then, in particular, how they should respond when the owners want them back.

"There is a big gap in the law," said Jeffrey Furbee, the chief legal adviser to the Police Department in Columbus, Ohio. "There is no common-sense middle ground to protect the public."

A vast majority of people with mental illnesses are not violent. But recent mass shootings — outside a Tucson, Ariz., supermarket in 2011, at a movie theater last year in Aurora, Colo., and at the Washington Navy Yard in September — have raised public awareness of the gray areas in the law. In each case, the gunman had been recognized as mentally disturbed but had never been barred from having firearms.

After the Newtown killings a year ago, state legislatures across the country debated measures that would have more strictly limited the gun rights of those with mental illness. But most of the bills failed amid resistance from both the gun lobby and mental health advocates concerned about unfairly stigmatizing people. In Washington, discussion of new mental health restrictions was conspicuously absent from the federal gun control debate.

What remains is the uncertain legal territory at the intersection of guns and mental illness. Examining it is difficult, because of privacy laws governing mental health and the limited availability of information on firearm ownership. But The New York Times obtained court and police records from more than 1,000 cases around the country in which guns were seized in mental-health-related episodes.

A systematic review of these cases — from cities and counties in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Tennessee — underscores how easy it is for people with serious mental health problems to have guns.

Over the past year in Connecticut, where The Times obtained some of the most extensive records of seizure cases, there were more than 180 instances of gun confiscations from people who appeared to pose a risk of "imminent personal injury to self or others." Close to 40 percent of these cases involved serious mental illness.

Perhaps most striking, in many of the cases examined across the country, the authorities said they had no choice under the law but to return the guns after an initial seizure for safekeeping.

For example, in Hillsborough County, Fla., 31 of 34 people who sought to reclaim seized firearms last year were able to do so after a brief court hearing, according to a count by The Times.

Among them was Ryan Piatt, an Afghanistan veteran with a history of treatment for depression, anxiety and paranoia. The police had descended on Piatt's workplace in November 2011, after mental health workers at the veterans hospital in Tampa reported that he had made intimations of violence to his psychiatrist and had tried to renounce his citizenship, mailing his Social Security card, birth certificate and other documents to a judge. Officers confiscated two guns from his car and one more from his toolbox; he got them back less than a year later.

Similarly, the sheriff in Arapahoe County, Colo., had to return a .45-caliber pistol last year that officers had seized four months earlier after receiving a call that Jose Reynaldo Santiago, an Army veteran with post-traumatic stress, was walking around his home in the middle of the night in a catatonic state with a gun in the pocket of his bathrobe.

Even in Indiana, one of the few states that have expanded the power of law enforcement to hold on to guns seized from people who are mentally ill, the examination revealed a significant loophole: There is nothing preventing them from going out and buying new guns.

The state's seizure law does not address the question, and as a result, records from gun confiscation cases are not entered into the federal background check database that dealers must consult when making sales, according to officials from the Indiana Supreme Court.

Connecticut had a similar vulnerability until this year. Unlike in Indiana, the Connecticut State Police handle gun background checks, running names in the federal system and checking its own records. Judicial officials are unsure, however, if the agency was receiving all gun seizure records. As a fail-safe and a way to prevent people from simply going to another state to buy a gun, the state has now begun submitting these records to the federal system.